Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/265



born under a bad star. My fate's written.' Following his youthful wisdom, this wounded hart dragged his slow limbs toward the halls of brandy and song.

"One learns to have compassion for fools, by studying them: and the fool, though Nature is wise, is next door to Nature. He is naked in his simplicity; he can tell us much, and suggest more. My excuse for dwelling upon him is, that he holds the link of my story. Where fools are numerous, one of them must be prominent now and then in a veracious narration."

According to the old duality of satirized objects,—Vice and Folly, identified with the deceiver and the deceived,—the two classes just discussed would exhaust the list. But these signify folly in its narrowest and most literal sense, a plain lack of brains and a general incapacity. In its wider sense it includes misuse as well as want of intelligence. These mortals, as Puck discovered, are indeed all fools, at times and on certain points. The number may not be infinite, but Lydgate discovered sixty-three kinds; and Barclay augmented the list to nearly one hundred. Perfect wisdom would cast out not only ignorance, but also frivolity, sentimentality, vanity, all sorts of false standards and all manner of fallacies. Therefore snobs, romanticists, egoists, fanatics, merely exemplify folly in its varieties and ramifications.

The snob is defined by his great expositor as "one who meanly admires mean things." A modern scholar calls vulgarity "satisfaction with anything inferior when a superior is attainable." These definitions together indicate why snobbishness and vulgarity are allied, though not identical. There is, however, this difference, that sat-*